"Reading Lisp feels remarkably like trying to beat a 2 year old child
at the game of 'why?'."
-- Slashdot comment
"'If you do the job right,' General Somervell said carefully, 'it will
win the war.'
Men like to recall, in later years, what they said at some
important or possibly historic moment in their lives... I remember
only too well what I said to General Somervell that day.
I said, 'Oh.'"
-- General Groves, when he was designated to lead the A-bomb project
"Tons of stuff.?Mucho merges with the "A-Team" (Alan, Al, Alexey,
Andrew, Anton, Arjan, Arnaldo and Art), but the "M-Team" (Maksim,
Marcel, Martin's and Mike) is a close runner up. The J's are doing
well too."
-- Linus Torvalds announcing 2.5.41
"for every fatal shooting, there were roughly three
non-fatal shootings. And, folks, this is unacceptable
in America. It's just unacceptable. And we're
going to do something about it."
-- G.W. Bush
"Presidents, whether things are good or bad, get the blame.
I understand that."
-- G.W. Bush
"sometimes seventeen
syllables ain't enough to
express a complete"
-- A haiku
"What is a free gift? Aren't all gifts free?"
"They call it 'PMS' because
'Mad Cow Disease' was already taken."
"<source> is linux better than windows? can i run freebsd under linux?"
"Some people are calling it the best book they've
ever read. Others say you shouldn't read it."
-- Scott Adams pushing one of his books
"How to thwart BSD and stay Linux or Win32:
Just subscribe your boss to an openBSD mailing list, any one will do,
then ask a question about the filing system, or SMP, boot loaders, or
journalling, or security, or, in fact, anything NIH. Rest assured that
the juvenile response will destroy any possibility of switching."
-- As seen on slashdot
[ From the FAQ of an OS written purely in assembler ]
"Why not C ?
If you want a C based OS, you might consider Linux. For my opinion there
is no point in coding an os in C anymore. It's already done."
-- MenuetOS
"We don't care. We don't have to. We're the Phone Company."
"I take a real beating in the new film. Robert Patrick (the T-1000) is much
more threatening and dangerous as the new Terminator. You see, the producers
realized that I'm far too good looking-no camera can take all these good
looks-so what they have to do beat me up, put all these appliances and
terrible makeup on my face to tone down how handsome I am."
-- Arnold Schwarzenegger
"A friend is someone you call to help you move. A real friend is someone you
call to help you move a body."
"Did you know that "gullible" isn't in the dictionary? Look it up."
"Moral victories don't count."
"Sincerity is the key. Once you can fake that, you've got it made."
"If at first you don't succeed, change the rules."
"You should never, NEVER give evidence that you may have committed a crime to
any reporter. If you don't believe me on this, check this out with your
lawyer"
-- The infamous Carolyn Meinel actually wrote this in an email
"Just my 0.02 cents"
-- Kinda up there with "The Y2000K problem"
"Inside every digital circuit, there's an analog signal screaming to get out."
-- Al Kovalick, Hewlett-Packard
"Bell Labs Unix - Reach out and grep someone."
"If OpenBSD hasn't had a remote hole in four years then how the hell did
somebody break in and deface the site with that gay-looking fish?"
"Practically anything can go faster than Disc light, which is lazy and tame,
unlike ordinary light. The only thing known to go faster than ordinary light
is monarchy, according to the philosopher Ly Tin Wheedle. He reasoned like
this: you can't have more than one king, and tradition demands that there is
no gap between kings, so when a king dies the succession must therefore pass
to the heir instantantaneously. Presumably, he said, there must be some
elementary particles -- kingons, or possibly quenons -- that do the job, but
of course succession sometimes fails if, in mid-flight, they strike an
anti-particle, or republicon. His ambitious plans to use his discovery to send
messages, involving the careful torturing of a small king in order to modulate
the signal, were never fully expounded because, at that point, the bar
closed."
-- Terry Pratchetts "Mort"
Nirvana's, "Smells Like Teen Spirit"
Misheard Lyrics: Load up on drugs and kill your friends
Correct Lyrics: Load up on guns and bring your friends
This was actually sung by Kurt on live
versions in 1993, what a funny guy
"Login incorrect.
Only perfect spellers may
enter this system."
"Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee
And I'll forgive Thy great big one on me."
-- Robert Frost
"Coffee without caffeine. Beer without alcohol. Milk without fat.
What's next? Bridal suites with bunk beds?"
-- Orben's Current Comedy
"The trouble with eating Italian food is that five or six days later you're
hungry again."
-- George Miller
"So why don't you make like a tree, and get outta here."
-- Biff in "Back to the Future"
"hey, if what you are making sucks, why not go out and sue everything that
moves?"
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to
factor large prime numbers."
-- Bill Gates, The Road Ahead, Viking Penguin (1995), page 265
(It's fun when you realize that prime numbers by definition *can't* be
factored into smaller numbers)
"To turn $100 into $110 is work. To turn $100 million into $110 million is
inevitable"
-- Edgar Bronfman
"Programming is like sex: one mistake and you have to support it for the rest
of your life."
-- Michael Sinz
"Why is it a moment of silence? What's this silence?
How 'bout a moment of screaming?! These people are dead! You know,
'AAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaghhh!!!"
-- George Carlin
"The risk/reward calculation for engineers looks something like this:
Risk - Public humiliation and the death of thousands of innocent people.
Reward - A certificate of appreciation in a handsome plastic frame.
Being practical people, engineers evaluate this balance of risks and rewards
and decide that risk is not a good thing. The best way to avoid risk is by
advising that any activity is technically impossible for reasons that are far
too complicated to explain.
If that approach is not sufficient to halt a project, then the engineer will
fall back to a second line of defense: "It's technically possible but it will
cost too much."
"Sex is like hacking. You get in, you get out,
and you hope you didn't leave something behind
that can be traced back to you"
"If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried."
"In space, no one can hear you scream."
"In cyberspace, no one *cares* if you scream."
(Or, in cyberspace, you will be kicked if you scream)
"your theory is very good, in theory"
"Your point here is as clear as mud"
"if I say fuck, two more times, that's fourty six fucks in this fucked up
rhyme"
-- Limp Bizkit
"Tell a man that there are 400 billion stars and he'll believe you. Say a
bench has wet paint and he has to touch it"
"From this perspective yeah it is pretty pathetic. There is some possibilities,
I mean I'm not gonna stand here and publicly bash microsoft 100%, i mean,
there is some possibilities... that they could eventually, ... you know...
you know... buy a vowel."
-- Simple Nomad, toorcon 2000
"When you understand UNIX, you will understand the world.
When you understand NT....you will understand NT"
-- R. Thieme
"People never grow up, they only learn how to act in public"
"[_Electro_ made this call during lunchtime at school, and I believe the
cafeteria food had sufficiently intoxicated him.]
<Op> BC Tel Operator, How May I Help You?
<Me> Yes, Hi. How are you doing today?
<Op> Fine Thanks, How Can I help you?
<Me> Well I was gonna pay with my calling card, but I can't seem to find it.
Would you like me to insert a coin instead?
<Op> Yes go ahead, insert your quarter.
<Me> No prob (I PLAY MY RED BOX TONES WITHOUT PUTTING IN 5 CENTS FIRST)
<Op> I am sorry sir you aren't putting in real coins
<Me> Hmmm. . .Yes, But. . . enough about me, lets talk about you
<Op> Excuse me?
<Me> So how's life? How are the kids? Oh Yeah, Can You tell me whats wrong
with my red box?
<Op> Very Funny. . . <Click>"
-- THTJ09
"...vanilla SGI boxes screaming 'hack me pleeeease, my vendor did such a
great job of making it eeeeeeasy' all over the place..."
-- Yuri Volobuev, "Playing redir games with ARP and ICMP"
"Q: If John Carmack refereed a hot jello wrestling match between Hellchick and
Mynx... who would win?
A: I think the jello would win because it's got the best reflection mapping,
LOD bias, and heat conductivity. Hellchick and Mynx may have the best
curve code, but we did curves in Quake 3, so it's old news."
-- Graeme Devine
"In accord with the fine American tradition of having an opinion without
either facts or experience to back it up, I have an opinion on this particular
debate."
"Never argue with an idiot. He will take you down to his level, and beat
you with experience."
"The phrase 'and then the company is screwed' is never something you want to
put in your business plan"
-- Bruce Schneier
"Computers don't make mistakes. What they do, they do on purpose."
-- Dale (King of the Hill)
"The search for life on the Red Planet will have to slow
down until people on Earth have worked out how to
land on Mars without crashing,"
-- Dr Carl Pilcher,
the scientist leading Nasa's planetary exploration programme.
"The fuss about cloning is rather silly, I can't see any essential distinction
between cloning and producing brothers and sisters in the time-honored way."
-- Stephen Hawking
"If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port, and the bus is
interrupted as a very last resort, and the address of the memory makes your
floppy disk abort, then the socket packet pocket has an error to report!"
"FS: Do you think that being married will
detract from your programming?
John: No, I wouldn't be getting married if I thought
that."
-- John Carmack
"Three thousand pieces of mail sitting in the spool
Three thousand pieces of mail sitting in the spool
And if you hit 'd' in your mail tool
There will be
2999 pieces of mail sitting in the spool
2999 pieces of mail sitting in the spool"
-- Alan Cox
"Guns don't kill people. It's those damn bullets. Guns just make them go
really really fast."
-- Jake Johanson
"In the spring 1998 - Gore called The Washington Post's
executive editor to tip him off on an ``error'' in the paper.
``I decided I just had to call because you've printed a
picture of the Earth upside down on the front page of
the paper,'' Gore said. "
-- www.algore-2000.org
"<spyke> what is 'orbit'
<thc69> It's what planets do around your mama... (Really, I don't do lots of
yo'mama jokes...)"
-- IRC
"LOL. That's a seriously sad statement. Totally pulled out of your ass too."
-- from the pmode mailing list
"The lesson from all this is either that Tim really values something fuzzy to
do with lunch, or that Quake 3 is so darn cool you can toss together maps in
less than an hour. Okay, maybe knowing what Tim knows helps, so we're going
to dissect his brain for science and get him working as our own personal AI
(John swears it's possible) churning out 24 levels a day 24/7 until some odd
Y2K bug causes him to make every telephone in the world ring at once.
Oh wait, that was Lawnmower Man."
-- Graeme Devine, id software
"Black holes are where God divided by zero."
"I was quite unhappy about that. Debugging a non-deterministic crash in
generated code. Joy."
-- John Carmack, .plan file
"<music style="do,re,me">
dough - the stuff I need for beer.
Ray - the guy who sells me beer
Me - the one who drinks the beer
Far - a long, long way to the bar.
So - I'll have another beer
La - la la la la....beer!
Tea - no thanks I'm drinking beer
And that will bring us back to...dough, dough, dough. (repeat as needed)
</music>"
"Never cross a dragon - for you are crunchy and taste delicious!"
"message passing as the fundamental operation of the OS is just an excercise
in computer science masturbation. It may feel good, but you don't actually
get anything DONE."
-- Linus Torvalds
"Calling EMACS an editor is like calling the Earth a hunk of dirt."
-- Chris DiBona on Dirt (Open Sources, 1999 O'Reilly and Associates)
"A hacker is a machine for turning caffeine into code"
"And exactly what evidence do you have to back it up, child ?"
"Different interpretations aside, the statement above looks pretty
much mathematical: precise, correct, and useless. ;-)"
"Software is like sex: it's better when it's free"
-- Linus Torvalds
"Ok sorry, I'll try to be less sexist in the future. Wanna fuck?"
"> why doesn't the Documentation/ tree include any docs on ext2?
Because you havent written any yet ?"
">>Sigh. Why can't the industry finally admit ATA/IDE/etc
>>is a kludge and switch to SCSI?
>Because SCSI is better.
Paranoid, are we? :-)"
-- Seen on the linux-kernel mailing list.
"When do you work?"
"Whenever I'm not busy."
"Throw the book away, its author is incompetent to make that statement. You
must therefore assume anythign else the author wrote is probably incorrect
and unsuitable for learning form"
-- Alan Cox, Linux kernel mailing list
The book was "Practical File System Design" by Dominic Giampaolo
"Thanks. Another book never to buy"
-- Alan Cox, about the above.
"Please don't continue to perpetrate this urban myth. The BSD FFS is more
likely to be corrupt than the ext2fs (note that their new journalling
softupdate stuff deals with most of the BSD ffs problems)"
-- Yes, Alan Cox again. Linux rocks!
"If the automobile had followed the same development as the computer, a
Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per per gallon,
and explode once a year killing everyone inside."
-- Robert Cringely, InfoWorld
"SYSTEM, n.:
1: a regular union of principles or parts forming one entire thing.
2: the economic/capitalistic entity that exploits *your* life.
3: that strange attractor in your perception of the world that you
have dubbed as, "they"."
"struct SoftwareProfessional {
double salary;
long lunches;
float jobs;
char unstable;
void work;
short tempers;
};"
"Everybody's kung-fu fighting,
those cows were fast as lightning."
-- IRC rocks :)
"... I'll believe in God as soon as he smacks me in the head."
"Binaries may die but source code lives forever"
"You say you need more filespace? <massive-global-delete>;
Seems to me you have plenty left...",
-- BOFH
"Wow. This is more than i can stand. A linux user trying to dial AOL.
It's like Bill Gates trying to install Slackware."
"A computer program does what you tell it to do, not what you want it to do."
"PROGRAMMING: Edit, Save, Exit, Compile, Run, Curse, Reboot."
"The fridge light DOES go out. Now let me out of here!!!!"
"The brain you have reached is not in service at this time."
"Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they're *not* out to get me."
"... In the beginning there was darkness on the computer
world, and the darkness was without form, and void.
And Gates said "let there be light", and there was a
general protection fault."
"The designs are not familiar, but they
are obviously the products of
intelligence. Implications: we have been
intercepted deliberately by a means
unknown, for a purpose unknown, and
transferred to a place unknown by
a form of intelligence unknown.
Apart from the unknowns, everything
is obvious."
-- James P. Hogan, "Giants Star"
"Forty-two!" yelled Loonquawl. "Is that all you've got to show
for seven and a half million years' work?"
-- Douglas Adams, "The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
"..and if I'm still free, Chevy Chase on me."
-- Abba
"Sweet dreams are made of cheese."
-- Eurythmics
"'Scuse me while I kiss this guy."
-- Jimi Hendrix
"..like a Ken doll in the wind."
-- Elton John
"Here we are now, we're potatoes!"
-- Nirvana
"Pie, oh, pineapple pie."
-- Pearl Jam
"Gotta leave it all behind and take a cruise."
-- Queen
"Don't use drugs - get high on hugs!"
"That, I don't know... never used sleep before...
would it be under dos.h or stdlib.h?"
"Is it morning already?"
"It works? Get out of here!
"After 15h of Quake you sleep pretty good."
"How long is johnc's finger anyway?"
"When you play duke3d, and you're around one of the
dancing ladies, do you ever... well do you ever just
sort of slip your left hand down from the run button for
a sec.. not for long, but do you ever ... genly squeeze
your testicles? ... I don't, I was just curious."
"Does this tokay character know the ID guys?"
"<fuckhead> damn, banned from #catholic without saying a word,
wonder why..."
"DOH!! Its on my other HD...which is sitting on the floor"
(Imagine)
"You may say I'm a hacker,
But I'm not the only one.
I hope someday you'll join us
And our games will fit in RAM."
"If you're attracted to hacking because you don't have a life,
that's OK too -- at least you won't have trouble concentrating.
Maybe you'll get one later."
"... Air conditioned environment - Do not open Windows."